


Cycles

by Lacertae



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 13:05:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2548523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lacertae/pseuds/Lacertae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>*pre-relationship Dave/Karkat* Over the course of three years spent on the meteor, travelling at top speed towards the new universe, Dave manages to break his shades twice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cycles

**Author's Note:**

> I was searching for something to write that wasn't going to end up rated E, and this came to mind. I hope you like :)

Over the course of three years spent on the meteor, travelling at top speed towards the new universe, Dave manages to break his shades twice.

The first time happens on an otherwise uneventful day.

He wakes up pretty early, feeling somewhat bored and in need of some practice, so he moves to the surface of the meteor. He stands in the middle of all the rubbish and the dust and the broken parts of the lab, ready to train a bit, and waits to see which future version of himself will come to train with him.

He’s a bit surprised when the Dave that flickers in sight is… older. Usually the loops are pretty short, so he doesn’t notice much difference in the Daves that he gets to see, but this one… he’s taller than he is, for once. There are differences that Dave, used to seeing himself from every angle, notices with just one glance; he has longer bangs in front of his eyes, and he holds himself in a way that to present Dave feels… odd.

Dave feels like something might happen to him in the future, but he doesn’t know what, and at least he’s still alive, and he’s doing loops, so it shouldn’t be anything world changing. He hopes.

Still, it puts him a bit on edge, because anything that Dave doesn’t understand makes him feel like he’s not in control, and it’s even worse when it’s about himself. Makes him wary, but it’s not like he can do anything about it now.

He’ll deal with things as they come, just like always.

The older Dave looks at him and gives him a wave, and even that small movement is different than what present Dave knows as normal. It’s… smoother, maybe? No, something else.

“Yo,” older Dave says, and present Dave shakes himself out of his thoughts and decaptchalogues his shitty sword, ready for some training. “Ready to get your ass kicked, little one?”

This Dave is… smoother in the way he fights, too.

For the first time, Dave feels a… disparity between himself and another Dave, as this older Dave’s skills are… improved. He uses moves this present Dave isn’t familiar with, and that throws him out of the loop, making it harder but more challenging and even _fun_ to spar with him.

It’s also a testament that his skills are growing, or will grow somehow in the future, and Dave wonders why he’s never attempted to do it before in the past. It’s the first time he’s seen himself older than just a week, a month tops.

This Dave is at least a year, if not two, in the future. This means close to the end of the meteor trip. He can see he will get better like this, it makes him want to keep it up –there is tangible progress there.

He feels some sort of excitement wrap around him, and their sparring makes him give it his all.

It’s awesome, and given how much boredom he’s felt in the past few weeks, that’s a good change of pace too.

The first whiff that something is wrong comes from older Dave’s head flickering to the side, looking at something behind him, and by the time present Dave notices it, he’s already being sent flying towards the ground by a strong kick, and his sword flings out of his hands.

He’s spiralling down, and as he spins in the air, recovering from the pain of the kick, he’s suddenly face to face with a shocked Karkat standing in the middle of his path.

Dave can’t stop his momentum nor change directions, and Karkat’s taken by surprise, so he doesn’t move out of the way quickly enough.

They collide and both end up on the ground, Dave send rolling for a good few feet more until he stops, a flaring pain in his side and the sound of something cracking that he seriously hopes is not his skull.

“Fuck, shit, ouch–” he grunts, shaky and panting hard as he pushes himself up on his knees and elbows. Whoa, that was a fall.

He barely notices something is wrong as he stands slowly, and by then it’s sort of too late because his shades fall apart on his nose and slip from his face, cleanly cut in two parts by the bridge.

Dave blankly stares at them at his feet, everything suddenly a bit too bright, and he winces, his ears buzzing and something wet on his temple that is probably blood from hitting the ground.

At his side, Karkat stands up cursing and spluttering and throwing glares his way, but Dave doesn’t notice until the troll is standing in front of him, mouth open to curse at him for his dangerous sparring sessions, and then stops, eyes wide.

“Well, fuck me sideways,” he says instead, voice raspy and filled with disbelief. “You have a face under those shitty shades of yours, who’d have thought…”

Dave feels a buzzing anger somewhere in the back of his mind, but most of all he’s just… surprised, because he wasn’t expecting it.

He gathers the broken pieces of his shades in his hands, stares at them for a moment, then carefully captchalogues them, and completely ignores Karkat, and ignores his older self, who probably knew this was going to happen and is observing them from the sky.

Karkat is saying something again, but Dave is not listening, and instead turns around and storms back into the lab, because the only shades he has left are the original ones, the ones without the communication devices he’s alchemized, the ones John gave him, and those are tucked safely away into his room, he doesn’t have them on him.

Not having anything on his face feels wrong, really wrong, and he avoids everybody until he’s back in his room and those shades are on his nose like a welcome weight; the world dims back into the usual colour, and he exhales in relief. He doesn’t have to worry about anything else now.

The tragic loss of his shades isn’t really an earth shattering disaster –they are just his spare ones, after all– but he’s left somewhat shaky because of that, and because he was lucky he wasn’t wearing his original ones.

He misses John a bit. He misses talking with him and ranting to him, and he misses Jade just as much, and he’s wanted to wear his gift for a while already even if it’s just silly to think that wearing those original aviators is going to alleviate this melancholy. To even contemplate doing so for non–ironic purposes makes him snort, but now here he is, wearing those Ben Stiller aviators and feeling upset for no reason, and angry at Karkat, and at himself.

This isn’t cool.

When he sees Karkat next, he ignores him completely, and Karkat is left perhaps baffled about it, because he’s insistent to say something but Dave doesn’t listen, he doesn’t care, and he ignores Rose’s worried glances and Kanaya’s curious stares and spends more of his time with Terezi, because she’s the only one that seems worth his time, and tries to forget that he’s just a little bit more cautious now during his spars.

***

Two years have passed on the meteor, and… everything is a mess.

He and Terezi don’t talk anymore, because things are really tense between them. Despite Dave not really understanding troll quadrants, and Terezi not understanding human romance, they have gotten together, and for a while everything looks great.

Sometimes they kiss, but they mostly just hang around together and have fun, and it is… good. It’s surprisingly good, and not at all different from when they did it as friends, aside for well, yes, the kissing, and sometimes they hold hands like the awkward teenagers they are.

Until it lasts, Dave thinks it’s worth it. He really likes her, Terezi is really cool.

But then it doesn’t last because she grows distant and he finds out he’s not really cool with her going out with someone else, even if it’s for ‘another quadrant’ and most of all it’s because she didn’t trust him with it until he found out on his own.

He feels betrayed, and it doesn’t work anymore and then he thinks there’s other things wrong there but she won’t trust him with them, and it just breaks into tiny fragments of shit, and he can’t do it anymore.

Rose has started indulging with her homemade alcohol, and Dave is far too afraid to confront the situation and admit it’s a problem, so he tries every now and then to get her to stop, but she won’t, she won’t even listen to Kanaya and she’s like, the most important person for Rose at this moment. Dave tries and tries but every time Rose acts like they are getting distant, and it breaks Dave in places he didn’t even know he could be broken, and after a while he can’t even muster the strength to address the problem.

He’s not good with people, and he’s got his own problems, and it’s selfish and it’s bad but he doesn’t realise until it’s too late, and by then he doesn’t know what to do anymore. He hopes Rose will come to her senses soon, and after all she’s got Kanaya.

For a while he’s alone and he hates it, but at least he has the Mayor.

The Mayor has become an important part of his life, and Dave can’t even remember how things were before he was there. He fills a place Dave didn’t even know he needed, that place that John and Jade have left vacant, even if of course it wasn’t because they _wanted_ to be absent.

But Dave really needs a friend, and the Mayor is silent but understanding, and even if there are misunderstandings, he considers him a good friend, and he really needed that.

And he’s started to notice that he has the Mayor, and Terezi has Gamzee, and Rose has Kanaya, but Karkat… Karkat has no one, and he feels a bit guilty about that.

Dave starts to think that maybe he can just… keep an eye out for him. Karkat isn’t that bad of a guy, really. He’s spent over a year poking fun at the guy, but it’s not like he dislikes him. He’s funny, and witty, and they have sparred sometimes, when they were both really bored and they needed to do something, anything, to pass the time.

Karkat is skilled and unpredictable and he is funny to talk with, the few times they managed to speak without it devolving into Karkat shouting at him and Dave tuning it out.

Dave feels it wouldn’t be too bad to get to know him a bit more, maybe… maybe there is a chance for them to work it out and become friends.

If Karkat wants to, of course. Dave doesn’t like one-sided friendships. He isn’t even sure it would work out with him, but he’s willing to try… not because he feels bad for Karkat, but because he understands how bad it feels to be left alone, and the Mayor is amazing but sometimes Dave feels he’s not enough.

He longs for some company, and maybe Karkat might feel the same. Who knows.

Karkat likes to go on walks on the surface of the meteor, and Dave thinks it’s ok to leave the Mayor to take care of Can Town on his own every now and then, so he leaves the lab and starts searching for the elusive troll.

He studiously avoids to look up, because he can still see it, the giant exploded dreambubble that shattered above the meteor almost a year ago. The shards and fragments are scattered across the black sky and some pieces can still be seen in the dim light of the moving meteor, and Dave doesn’t need to lose any more sleep thinking about it.

They have left the physical dreambubbles behind a lot ago, but the memory of those screams isn’t something he has managed to let go yet.

Still, it’s the thought of the dreambubble that makes him hesitate when he sees black hair in the distance, and suddenly he’s not sure that talking with Karkat might be the best idea.

After all, things are strained between them because, in his words, ‘Dave got the girl’, even if they are both aware that Terezi wanted this just as much as Dave did, and ok now Dave and Terezi are not together anymore, but Karkat doesn’t know that, doesn’t know _why_ , and the fucking clown is gone and only Terezi sees him and it’s all a clusterfuck of shit and maybe being friends with Karkat isn’t the best option at the moment.

He hesitates another moment, then turns around, he wants to go back inside, forget all about Karkat, about this shitty situation, maybe he can force something out of Rose, maybe he can just wallow inside his room or whatever and…

And then a future Dave flickers in front of him, and Dave stops abruptly and looks up at him. it takes him a second to realise this Dave is… the same older Dave from before, the vibe is the same, and he’s still taller than him, though not by much anymore. He has a very vivid memory of the last time he’s seen him, and his hands run to his shades and then he wonders why this future Dave his here again, after almost a year.

Taller, weird, off. This future Dave still makes present Dave feel like he’s missing something, but it doesn’t take him long to finally understand what he’s missing.

A flicker of understanding finally sparkles inside him, and present Dave searches in the face of his future self for some sort of answer that he doesn’t get.

Future Dave… yes, that’s what it is. He looks calm. Relaxed. He’s not tense, he’s not forcing himself to look casual like present and past Dave always had to do, to maintain his coolkid persona.

Future Dave looks relaxed in a way that seems natural. Like he’s ok with things, like somehow things make sense in the future, like Dave has had an epiphany down the road that makes him different. Present Dave hasn’t felt ok with things in a long while, and the longer he stays on the meteor the less he feels ok, the more he wants out.

This is such a bullshit thing to see in his future self, almost as if something good is awaiting for Dave somewhere in front of him but not there yet, and Dave feels almost pressured by what he sees, he’s almost scared because this future Dave seems more genuine and genuine isn’t something Dave has ever seen in himself, and that’s what’s off with this Dave, and… and…

–and he backs away from his future self, a subconscious denial, and he isn’t even looking where he’s stepping so when the back of his foot meets air and he stumbles, Dave has no time to even notice as he falls.

The last he sees of future Dave, since he will not see him ever again until he becomes him, is a small smile that doesn’t look forced –it’s natural and amused and somewhat warm, and it’s so weird to see that on his face that Dave closes his eyes and wishes he could unsee it.

He falls and keeps falling down a small slide made of dirt, rocks and broken wires and bricks, and the world spins around him as he falls, and he has only a split second to feel a wave of impending doom and then he faceplants against a rock.

There is a crack, pain flares up in his face, tears well up in his eyes, and he pants and curls up in a ball, debris clattering all around him.

Well, that wasn’t graceful and cool at all, and if he wasn’t busy groaning in pain he would feel a wave of embarrassment. Thanks God nobody saw except, well, himself, but he can live with that.

He’s dizzy, and his ears ring, and he hears something in the distance, then the sound of footsteps coming his way.

Ah. Way to call it too early. Someone saw. Awesome.

Then Karkat’s voice rings above him, asking something (probably if he’s fine or if his brain is leaking outside, if he knows him), but the moment Dave recovers he’s scrambling to rip his shades off his eyes to look at them.

There is a crack on one of the lens.

The corresponding eye throbs with every blink, and his sight is slightly blurry because it hurts so much his eye is leaking all over, but the devastation that he feels has nothing to do with any physical pain.

He’s been… so, _so_ careful.

He’s spent the past year carefully avoiding anything that could be harmful to his shades, sometimes even going as far as to make sure some close-future Dave popped around to reassure him they were still fine.

This is his last pair, his original ones.

They are cracked now.

Not broken, he can still… wear them… but… but…

There is a crack on one of the lenses, and that’s not gonna disappear.

Something flares up in his chest and he hates that feeling so much he can maybe sort of understand what Karkat keeps yapping all the time, about hating himself. In this moment, Dave can totally get it.

Then Karkat’s face comes in front of him, and damn that troll he looks so worried that Dave tries to look ok, tries to look away from his shades and reassure Karkat that things are fine, that he was just clumsy and useless, that…

“Oh, good, your face looks exactly the same as before, you’ll live Strider,” Karkat mutters, relief in his tone, and pulls away from him, grudgingly offering him a hand.

Dave ignores it and staggers to his feet.

If he wasn’t so shaken about the shades, he would feel acute embarrassment for this faux pas, but… as it is, he gives no shits about that.

He still hasn’t looked away from his shades, and Karkat seems to notice because he looks down, and tugs the aviators out of his grip to observe them with critical eyes.

“Look you’ve busted another pair,” he tells him, almost smugly. “How many of these do you have anyway? I bet you just change them every day, nobody would be any wiser. Well, just throw those away and–”

His hands dart out, so quickly it surprises even Dave himself, and he grabs his shades back with what feels almost like panic.

Karkat is startled and frowns at him, though he still seems somewhat worried, but Dave turns around and limps away from Karkat, because he doesn’t need this now.

He feels this weight on his chest that’s not going away, and he shouldn’t be because… John gave those shades to him as a joke. They weren’t meant to be taken seriously, and it’s not cool to take them seriously, everything is a joke, everything is ironic, but these are so not ironic for him and the layers of shit he’s shovelled on top of how seriously he takes those aviators are melting away and he’s feeling raw and open and shitty and–

And he doesn’t need Karkat there right now, either.

“F-fuck off,” he mutters, and his voice comes out harsher than he means it, but also totally not steady and he’s a fucking mess.

“Strider, what the fuck is your problem?! Did you hurt your thinkpan when you fell? Do you need to see Rose?”

“Just fuck off, ok? I don’t need Rose, I don’t need you, leave me the fuck alone”.

He limps away slowly, but does not turn around, and he hopes Karkat will be pissed off enough to let him leave, because he is starting to think he’s reached the bottom of the echeladder, and he can’t go any lower.

It’s really shitty, because he didn’t think there was a limit and he wasn’t aware he was getting there, and he seriously isn’t the messed up one on the meteor, he thought he was doing fine, compared to Rose the new alcoholic and Terezi the violent clown lover and Karkat the grouch-ass but somewhere down the road he has messed up something, he’s sure of it, and now it’s coming back to bite him in the ass.

And because he has this huge luck, Karkat refuses to leave him the fuck alone, go figures.

Karkat darts forwards and it takes him three steps to reach him and step in front of him, preventing him from walking away; Dave is aching all over and he just wants to go somewhere else and wallow in self-pity because it’s not like he’s not allowed to do so once in a while.

But apparently yeah, he’s not allowed to do that.

“Fucking Strider, what the hell is wrong with you,” Karkat seems really angry. He is angry. But he’s also weirdly worried, and somewhat anxious, and if Dave was capable of feeling anything right now he’d be touched. But no, fuck that. “Why were you here anyway? You never come on the surface anymore after the…” Karkat waves his arm, and they are both perfectly aware of why Dave never comes out of the lab, which is the exact reason he wanted to go back inside a minute ago.

 _‘I was looking for you, you douchebag,’_ does not come out from his lips, but he mouths the first half of it and looks away, and he’s vaguely thankful that Karkat doesn’t know how to read lips.

Or maybe he does, because the next thing he knows is that Karkat is even closer, and is inspecting his face with critical eyes, fingers hovering close to his wrist in case Dave tries to leave again. “What couldn’t wait till I was done with my alone-time, you fucking prick?”

And Dave removes himself once again from Karkat’s scrutiny, and wonders how long it’s been since he’s been this physically close to someone. It’s been a while, and even if he bumps fists and shoulders with the Mayor all the time, it sort of doesn’t feel the same.

There is a longing somewhere inside Dave, but it’s buried under a lot of other issues and he doesn’t address any of those, so it’s not like it’s important he addresses this one in particular.

“Nothing, that’s what, I just thought… fuck that shit, let me go, I’m fine,” he tries to reassure the damn troll again, but he doesn’t sound ok and Karkat gives him a withering look.

“Yeah, sure, you’re so ok you’re bleeding all over and your face is all swollen and it looks disgusting, Strider,” Karkat snorts, but Dave is maybe a bit calmer now, and hears the _worry_ echo in his tone, and he feels this close to snapping that it’s not even funny.

Dave makes a passable snort. “You said my face looked the same as usual”.

Karkat huffs, loudly, then actually grabs his wrist. “Don’t be daft. What the fuck is your problem?”

“I said it’s nothing,” and it might be his insistence, but Dave is finally starting to get a grip of himself. To get rid of Karkat, he says the first thing that comes to his mind. “Kanaya wanted to see you, sent me out there, that’s all”.

Karkat seems surprised –probably because nowadays it’s hard to see Kanaya away from Rose, the two of them are inseparable, which Dave is grateful for considering Rose drinks all the time and he finds it painful to be with her, which makes him all kinds of guilty but doesn’t change the fact that she won’t listen to him, no matter what he says.

The fact that Karkat is still here means he’s not buying it fully, so Dave makes his best impression of past Dave, blank face and a small sneer, and that decides it for him; Karkat turns around and leaves, because while what they have is better than how it started, they are still not friends, and Karkat is friends with Kanaya and there goes his allegiance.

Dave does not understand why it makes him feel sad, when he was the one who decided not to bother becoming friends with Karkat in the first place.

He watches the troll run towards the lab, and slowly follows him, using his powers to levitate in the air a bit because his legs ache. He needs to rest a bit and forget about what happened to his shades, if only for a moment.

***

By the time it’s appointed dinner time (his internal clock keeps the time even if they are not orbiting around a sun, how convenient) Dave’s face has returned to normality, because he’s a godtier and because that’s just how it is for them.

His shades, however, remain cracked, and it’s perhaps even worse that the rest of him is fine again.

It’s not _fair_.

Even if he puts them up, the crack is visible from his vision, and it’s annoying and he can’t stop looking at it, so that doesn’t help.

He’s grouchy, he’s pissed off, he’s feeling somewhat alone and doesn’t even want to see the Mayor, which somewhat makes Dave feel like this is bigger than it is, and it’s not… it shouldn’t be big at all.

But it is, and there is no irony anymore, he’s dried it all up a while ago.

_(I’m sorry John)_

There is a hesitant knock at his door, and he sighs but goes to open it, not sure who it might be.

It’s the Mayor, and he’s holding a can and a chalk in his hand, and Dave looks down at him and wonders why he’s disappointed that it’s not…

Who should it be? Rose? But she’s inebriated, and not even she could know the depths of the shit Dave feels, not that it’d be more important than the shit she feels anyway. Dave is a big boy, and he knows he’s not the centre of the universe. Or the meteor. Or of anything, really. But it’s still disappointment that he feels, and he guesses he’s allowed to feel it, as long as he recognises it for what it is.

When the Mayor shifts the can to make him see it, Dave finds himself staring into a small replica of his face on the can. It’s a cool can with shades and a crudely drawn time symbol and even a small smug smirk. Yes, that’s him.

He chuckles, and the knot in his chest feels tighter and at the same time lighter.

“Man, that is awesome Mayor!” he praises, and the carapace looks at him, smile a bit under all the wraps of his tattered clothes (they tried once to give him clean ones, but he is wearing them as a sort of repentance and will not accept new ones yet. Maybe one day in the future things will be different, but for now Dave respects it), and pats his arm.

Dave accepts the can, and promises the Mayor he will come to new Can Town tomorrow. It’s a promise, and the Mayor leaves with a skip to his steps.

He keeps the can next to his bed and stares at it for a long while, and wonders why he feels like even that can is mocking him, because he doesn’t feel himself mirrored in it even if it _is_ him.

***

He is woken up by a sort of angry knocking that belongs to only one person on the meteor, and he hurries to the door even as he’s sleepy and not entirely coherent, and he comes face to face with Karkat standing there, looking grouchy and annoyed.

Dave hasn’t had the time to put on his shades this time, and it’s a first since it’s almost an instinctive gesture whenever he wakes up, no matter how sleepy he is, and that is a testament of how he’s been shaken because of the cracked aviators. He stares at Karkat with wide eyes, and finds himself matching the troll’s height for once.

Huh. He’s never realised that Karkat has grown taller, now. Just as tall as him. Is he starting to fill in? When did this happen?

“What…” he doesn’t know what to say to Karkat’s presence, but then he remembers he tricked Karkat away with a lie about Kanaya, so he’s probably going to get ranted at. “Listen, I–”

Karkat shoves something in his nose, and Dave automatically steps back, thinking Karkat wants to punch him, then he blinks and looks down. Karkat is holding something small, dark and see-through, slightly curved and smudged with Karkat’s digits, and it takes Dave a long while to understand what it is.

When he does, his eyes get wide.

It’s a lens.

Specifically, it’s for a pair of shades, and Dave takes it delicately from Karkat’s hand and stares at it in wonder, then looks at Karkat, and his face is for once so easy to read that Karkat can do it easily, and doesn’t even snort as he pushes past him to get inside Dave’s room.

“You lied to me, you fucker,” Karkat says, sitting down on Dave’s unmade bed, and Dave sits down at his side and says nothing. “Kanaya didn’t want to talk to me, and that was a lousy lie, and you should be ashamed of yourself”.

Dave isn’t really listening to him. He’s clutching the lens in his hands and looking down at it.

Karkat realises this and taps him delicately on the shoulder, probably the first non-aggressive gesture he’s shared with him aside for his demand for Dave to touch his cheek that one time, not too long ago. Dave looks up and stares at him.

“Rose was inebriated as fuck with her weird human concoction, and it was hard to get her to talk about your shades, but… she was pretty talkative once we got down to it. Informative, even. She told me a lot of things, and I admit I’m not quite sure how much of it is the fumes of the alcoholic beverage and what’s true, but I can take an educated guess”.

He pauses, and looks around, locating Dave’s broken shades, and gets up to take them. Dave doesn’t stop him.

“Those are important to you, Rose said,” Karkat continues, and he handles the shades with careful hands, unlike before. “I’m sorry for what I said earlier, about you throwing them away. I hadn’t known about…” he makes a vague gesture, and Dave has to wonder just how much Rose has told him.

If she was sober enough to remember everything Dave told her, about Bro, about his previous shades, about all the things Dave told her during their late-at-night talks, about how he’s so proud to be Bro’s little bro, and how he loved the man but Bro wasn’t always the perfect Bro Dave wanted him to be. About how it’s tiring to be in a house where you can’t keep fresh food in the fridge, where you have to be wary of cameras everywhere, all the time. About how Dave was proud to wear the shades he gave him, but when John’s gift came… it meant the world to him. How sometimes Dave wished things had been different and how that made him feel like shit. Rose seemed to understand, and just that once, she spoke without passive-aggressive bullshit, just honest words, telling him that he was allowed to be his own person, that Bro would want him to be Dave, not another Bro. That the shades maybe helped him make this distinction. That she’s proud of him.

Dave sees she’s falling behind to the place he’d been too, but she won’t listen to him, and he wonders what will be strong enough to shake her, if it will ever happen, and he really wishes it will, and knows it won’t be him.

But he has been proud of her before, and he is still proud of her now, and that will never change, and it’s thanks to her that Dave can try to become the kind of guy he wants to be.

He wonders if she told Karkat even just a fraction of all of this, and wonders if he should be angry at her, or grateful, or both.

“Did you… did you stay up all night to alchemize this for… me?” he asks, and his voice does that weird waver where he just wants to hide his face in a pillow and be done with it.

Karkat clears his throat. “Don’t make yourself sound more important than you are, Strider. Not all night. Just a bit. It wasn’t that long”.

Dave is careful with the shades. He removes the cracked lens in religious silence, and then places the new one inside and secures the bolt.

It fits perfectly, and the colour is identical to the other one, and he doesn’t even know how much that had to take for Karkat to make such a perfect fit, and he’s just floored because… why would Karkat do something like this for him?

“Thank you,” he mutters, and it’s probably the most honest thing he’s said in a long while that wasn’t directed at the Mayor.

He finds his arms and the rest of his body almost too big and clumsy now, doesn’t know where to look, where to put his hands, fidgets like he’s sitting in an anthill, and Karkat rips his shades out of his grip and pushes them onto his nose.

It feels like everything is fitting into place where it was before, only better.

“Here. See? Good,” Karkat grunts. “All better”.

He doesn’t mention that he’s wasted more than just a couple hours on this lens. He doesn’t say he has cut it the size of Dave’s shades using his scythe and all the patience in the world, that he didn’t know if it would fit but he worked around it using the alchemizer as a reference, and that his hands ache a bit.

Karkat also feels incredibly awkward, because he didn’t think he would ever do something like this for Dave, of all people, but it just… it worked out that way. That’s all.

It’s just bad that he doesn’t feel like leaving now.

Dave thinks it’s just bad that he doesn’t want Karkat to leave now, not after doing all of this for him.

Dave doesn’t mention that now his shades have acquired a new sort of meaning, and that this gift is probably even more important because it’s not just John’s casual, strong friendship now, but there’s also this tentative reaching out that Karkat is doing.

And considering Karkat has taken the first step, it’s only right Dave shows him it’s not a lost cause.

“So, uh… I was wondering, me n’ the Mayor were thinking to expand Can Town today with a sweet new park,” he says, and he tries to be casual. He’s almost sure he fails at it. “Think you wanna help out?”

Karkat looks taken aback, and Dave isn’t even sure he’ll accept, since before he’s never shown interest for Can Town, nor towards any of that stuff, but then he shrugs.

“Have nothing better to do,” he acquiesces.

Dave pushes his shades up the bridge of his nose, and smiles a bit.

Yeah, ok. That sounds like it can work.

***

It is somewhere around the third year on the meteor, and Dave has just spent an entire day painting incredibly detailed flowers in front of the Mayoral Hall when he feels the pull of a time cycle wanting to be concluded.

It ticks inside him, and pulls, alerting him he needs to get going soon, and he lets his mind fill with Time to check where he has to go.

The answer makes him blink, and he stops drawing instantly.

He has now become that older Dave he’s seen during the first year, that tall Dave with longer hair –he tugs his bangs, frowning, he hasn’t realised they were this long already– that has sparred with him and caused his shades to break, causing the first of a chain of events that apparently lead him to… today.

Dave stands up and stretches, and catches the attention of both the Mayor and Karkat, who have been discussing the benefits of increasing the size of the pond lake and the amount of can-ducks of the pond.

They have been all kinds of busy.

“Oi, where are you going Dave?”

“Time cycle man, you know how it goes,” he explains calmly, and smiles a bit when Karkat snorts.

“Yeah, yeah. Make it quick, we have a lot of work if we want to inaugurate the prison before it’s dinner time”.

Karkat is sprawled on the ground, incredibly uncaring of how attractive he looks with his sleeves covered in chalk and that serious expression when talking about a fictional town and its cans, and at his side the Mayor nods seriously, poking Dave’s leg to make sure he is also aware that this is a matter of utmost importance.

Dave nods. Of course he knows. He was the one who proposed the motion in the first place. He needs to be there.

“I’ll make sure not to mess up anything,” he promises, and makes a boy scout salute even though he has never been a boy scout and he’s pretty sure he had it all wrong anyway.

He kneels on the floor, gives the Mayor a quick pat on the shoulder, and then wishes he could kiss Karkat but instead he offers him a fist to bump, because the kissing thing isn’t going to happen until he gets the courage to actually _tell_ Karkat he wants to smooch him, and he isn’t sure he’s there yet.

It has been a long year, but things have started to look up, and Dave isn’t even that afraid of what’s going to happen now that they are so close to the new universe.

He thinks that they have a lot to do. He thinks about Rose’s problem, about Terezi’s problem, about Karkat and Gamzee, about finally seeing John and Jade again, and he thinks… he thinks he can somehow do it. He’s feeling almost level-headed, huh.

They can do it, and then maybe he can tell Karkat everything. They will enter the new session, they will survive, they will win, and he will tell Karkat he wants to smooch him. and then he will do exactly that.

Dave calls forth Time and flickers back, and the world twists around him, and it’s really uncanny how the meteor is still the same when he arrives, even if he knows he’s hundred miles in the past now.

Dave’s past self looks small and scrawny, and present Dave spares only a second to look at him and marvel at how far he’s gotten, now that he can actually look at it from the other end of the perspective.

Past Dave is thinner than he thought he was back then. He is tense, and Dave wonders how he could ever think he was good at poker face, because his past self looks just… constipated, maybe.

It’s almost embarrassing.

They spar, and Dave is embarrassed to see how weak his past self is. It’s thanks to sparring with Karkat that he finally learned an edge to his training schedule that no amount of practice with himself alone could ever achieve, so he supposes he should thank the fucker.

Nah, he won’t do that. He will just alchemize a lot of the shitty food Karkat loves and he will magically understand, just the way he always seems to know what Dave really means when he says stuff.

Dave waits, catches his past self looking at him in confusion, and wishes he could tell him what will happen, how his world will crash and burn and slow start to be rebuilt in the course of the next two years, but he stays silent, because he can’t take the risk to doom the universe.

He likes it too much to mess up.

Younger Karkat –shorter, bags under his eyes for lack of sleep, never smiling, almost scrawny– finally appears at the edge of his field of vision, and Dave almost smiles as he kicks his younger self and sends him flying towards him.

He can’t really stay long for the outcome, but catches Young Dave’s face when the shades break, and all he can think is ‘it gets worse before it can get better’, and that fits for just about any point of Dave’s life.

He drifts forwards in time, but not too much, because he still has one thing to do before going home, before going back to the present, and this is even trickier.

He’s grateful for it.

He pauses a second to think about Karkat, about the tentative smile he’s offered him when Dave proclaimed they were best buds.

He thinks about their growing friendship, about them spending time together, he thinks about Can Town, and the time spent to build it with Terezi and then expand it with Karkat. He thinks about Rose, who has Kanaya but is still painfully caught in her vice.

He thinks about Terezi, and how he’s not talked to her in so long, and how he hopes she’s still happy because otherwise what was the point for them breaking up, if she isn’t?

He thinks about Kanaya, and how she deserves some rest, and how maybe he’ll make another attempt to invite her over to Can Town, if only to get her to sleep a bit while he tries to tend to his sister for once, because Kanaya wants to do everything on her own, and doesn’t understand that sometimes it’s ok to let someone else do some of the work for you.

Dave still has some trouble with understanding that himself, but one day he might get there. In the meantime he can be a hypocrite and prod Kanaya.

He thinks about John, and Jade, and wonders if they are ok, and he’s excited that they will meet up soon, and then they can talk, and they will help with Rose too.

He thinks all of this as he places himself in front of past Dave, and watches him fall down a hill.

He thinks about how breaking his shades twice is what set his life in motion again, and how likely was that to happen?

He doesn’t know.

All Dave knows is that present Dave has plans, and he promised he’d make it quick.

Dave flickers out of sight, and returns to where he belongs.

The road is still long in front of him, but for a short while, he’s allowed to play pretend.

Karkat is waiting for him with a smile, after all.

 


End file.
